Dent, Edward J. Ferruccio Busoni: A Biography. London: Oxford University Press, 1933. xv, 368 pp. Indexed.

Repr. eds. London: Oxford University Press, 1966. London: Ernst Eulenburg, 1974. New York: Da Capo Press, 1982. Indexed.

Trans. Jorge Velazco into Spanish. Mexico: Universidad Nacional Aut6noma de M6xico, 1975. 391 pp. Indexed.

Written by the great English scholar and friend of Busoni. In a way still unsurpassed more than fifty years after its original publication though much too short on footnotes by modern scholarly standards. Dent's compelling narrative of Busoni's life is interspersed with penetrating insights about his human and artistic development. Even though the book is primarily biographical, the Concerto for Piano, Orchestra, and Male Chorus, BV 247, and Doktor Faust, BV 303, are commented upon at length. Contains a list of Busoni's piano repertory (ordered by composer), a list of his twelve Berlin orchestral concerts (1902-9), and a catalog of the works prepared by Friedrich Schnapp. A detailed index and numerous photographs complete this outstanding source. Velazco's translation adds an introduction (pp. 9-15), a bibliography, a discography, and 208 notes, mainly biographical notes about the people mentioned in the text (pp. 345-61).

The last scene of all-Faust with the dead child. The child, Busoni tells us in his preface, is a symbol. Faust's union with the Duchess was an act of impulse, with no sense of deliberate purpose towards an ultimate end. The appearance of Mephistopheles with the dead child is meant to convey to Faust a warning of this ultimate purpose, but Faust does not understand it, and Mephistopheles leads him further astray by conjuring up the vision of Helen. From the body of the dead child the 'Ideal' is to arise, but Faust finds this 'Ideal' false and deceptive. He renounces all hope of it, and renounces magic too by destroying the.magical book. It is only when he meets the Duchess again in the last scene that he grasps the significance of the child, and it is only after his last'attempt at an approach to God has proved vain and futile that he can perform the mystic rite by which he transfers his own personality to the oncoming generation, thereby renewing his own exhausted life in the life of the future.

Busoni had been brought up in an atmosphere of Catholic piety, but he had already reacted against the doctrines of the Church when he was a young man, and although he never altogether lost a certain affection for the picturesque aspect of Catholicism, he never again returned to the Christian faith. Writing to the Swiss poet Hans Reinhart-a keen enthusiast for Wagner-in 1917, he says:

'Wagnerism and Christianity as well are nothing to me, and my feeling is that it is time to sweep away these two beliefs altogether, or at least to leave them in peace and not to poke about in them any more.'

To the same correspondent he wrote again in May 19Z3, thanking him for a book, to which he alludes in the first sentence here quoted:

'I suspect that your "New Life" becomes a dream-vision in other forms of what previously was hostile to life. It has always affected me unpleasantly from childhood to note how South German art makes eyes at death and treats death as its perpetual motive. Against that my Latin blood rebels. Our Latin inability to preoccupy ourselves with death is seen at its best in Verdi's Requiem and Rossini's Stabat Mater, in which life departed is irradiated by the life of the present. Even Dante's Inferno is retrospective, and concerns itself exclusively with the acts committed by the damned during their lives. In Orcagna's Dance of Death, living people walk past coffins, holding their noses.

'Nowhere in my. life did I hear so much talk about death as in' Switzerland, where people (to speak honestly) are unusually careful and concerned for their earthly existence. Those of Latin origin will exchange life for an idea without any longing for death; they do so rather from a longing to enrich their lives.'

I Busoni refers to the frescoes in the Campo Santo at Pisa.
Faust at his last end is conscious of being liberated from God and Devil alike; he will set mankind free from the eternal quarrel which has been handed on from generation to generation. It is to the new world of youth that he looks forward. That new generation which he loved-and often chastised so ruthlessly~is already learning to carry on those ideals to which all his life he had aspired.

'Habe nun, ach! Philosophie, juristerei und Medizin-'

Faust is the seeker after experience. There are many people who value their experiences, but few who value experience. They are only too often afraid of pursuing experience beyond those single experiences that they have valued, because they are afraid that new experience may destroy for them the value of the old. Busoni's life had been crowded with experiences in endless profusion and variety. Setting aside what he had traversed in fifty years of professional life as a musician, he had enriched his personality with an astonishing knowledge of literature, painting, and architecture. In his travels over almost all Europe and North America he had stored up the memory of landscape in all its diversities; in every country he had sought the knowledge of human beings of all conceivable types. He had known the struggles and the glories of the virtuoso, the inward concentration of the composer, the self-dedication of the teacher; he had won the love and devotion of pupils and friends, he had experienced what perhaps was to him the most precious experience of all in his life-thirty years and more of unclouded sympathy and happiness in marriage.

Busoni had the courage not only to pursue experience, but to discard without hesitation or regret those fruits of earlier experience which in the course of time had come to lose their savour. We can trace his musical progress in his pianoforte repertory;' we can watch him gradually discarding one composer after another, as they fail to satisfy See Appendix.
his ever soaring standard. That keen critical sense which he applied so rigorously to himself, both as pianist and as composer, gave him the reputation among the more traditional-minded of being nothing but an iconoclast and a destroyer. To timid souls it was certainly frightening to hear him speak of Schubert as 'a gifted amateur',' to listen to his grotesque mockery of Schumann and his titles to the movements of Carneval, to read that Chopin did not understand how to write for the pianoforte and that Beethoven did not possess the technique to express his emotions. In those last years, when he wrote to Philipp that he felt himself forced to abandon the whole of his former repertory, he might well seem, for the moment, to be no more than a world-weary cynic hurling forth his last gesture of surfeit and despair. But despair was an emotion entirely outside Busoni's experience. 'Dear Gerda, let us hope for the future,' he had written to his wife at a moment when fortune looked blackest. Whatever he discarded he left behind him in the spirit of the~snake that casts its skin. It had been precious while it lasted; one has only to turn back to his earlier writings or recall the memory of earlier conversations to see that he discarded nothing until he had completely exhausted all that there was to be learned from it. Even the ruin remained sometimes as a memorial; if younger friends. attempted in their haste to overtake his startling judgements, they were reminded that they had no right to discard these things until they too had gone through all the experience of understanding them.

The greatest, the most apparently inexhaustible, of the masters were but tmnsitory; this fact one must recognize without trembling. Even the score of Figaro, he found, had its weak places. All must come to an end in'its time, but each end was a new beginning-a new beginning not for his own development alone, but for the whole art of music. Music was infinite: its past was as nothing to its future. If he was forced to recognize the limitations of Recorded by Wilhelm Kienzl.
human life, there was always a new music to come, far beyond the boundaries of his own personal knowledge. In the endless history of the art, what could be the achievement of any one man, be he Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven? They were all 'beginners', each the beginner of a new era, prophet of a new vision of music's infinity.